With the weather turning cool again, I've been picking up my knitting needles again and decided to start off my 'knitting season' with trying mittens for the first time in my self-taught-and-often-wonky knitting career.
I'm working on minimizing some of my small stash of yarn because it's probably nice to be frugal but mostly because most of it was purchased before I had a clear idea of what I like to knit. Now that I know, I'd like to use up my old stash so I can...ahem!....replace it with a newer, more useful stash. This yarn is Crystal Palace's mini mochi rainbow yarn. It was the soft rainbow colors that tempted me to pick up two balls of it at one of my local yarn shops on a whim. The yarn is one ply and extremely splitty and I've not had success knitting it into anything until I finally decided to look at their website and see what they suggested to do with it.
Mittens seemed like a good idea for displaying the colors, using up the maximum amount of yarn and also the challenge of trying a new type of project. I've been wanting to try mittens for a long while now but frankly the thumb always frightened me. As it turns out, this 'thumb business' as I've so often referred to it in my head was a lot easier than I thought it would be and once I slid the stitches from the holding yarn and back to my needles it knitted up in a snap. I'm a litle disappointed that that the first ball of yarn had such a large yellow and orange swath in the middle of it because nearly four of the rings on the first mitten are all very similar colors. The yarn on the wrist of the second mitten is behaving in a much more satisfying way.
Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series has been around for quite some time and I've read most of them a few times but I've always borrowed someone else's copy. When I saw the first one on clearance the other day I just knew I had to pick it up because I enjoy this series a great deal. I began to reread it the other day and again I am struck by how much I enjoy the strength of the main female character. The author writes her well, tempering her strengths with weaknesses just like any real person and never portrays her obnoxiously or thoughtlessly headstrong for no reason other than writing a 'strong female' like so many other books and movies often do.
I recently recommended it to a friend and she borrowed a copy from the library and it came with a CD of songs from the musical. A musical! I'm not so sure how I feel about the idea of Outlander being a musical. I love the old Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals but I'm don't think I'm ready to see someone else's interpretation of Jamie & Claire's story. Plus...historical fiction? romance? time travel? That's an awful lot to pack into a musical!
I've joined with Ginny for her Yarn Along and am looking forward to seeing what everyone else is knitting and reading!
